Not sure if this has been suggested before but I've noticed in (at least) Windows 10 using keyboard volume keys gets the album artwork and information displayed (see screenshot) https://prnt.sc/jmpqyg

Is it possible for the .dll to hook into this process and use this to grab all the necessary information? As it seems that this is consistent (although it lacks compatibility with older versions of windows potentially and other Operating systems)

^LeveLUP^ wrote:Not sure if this has been suggested before but I've noticed in (at least) Windows 10 using keyboard volume keys gets the album artwork and information displayed (see screenshot) https://prnt.sc/jmpqyg

Is it possible for the .dll to hook into this process and use this to grab all the necessary information? As it seems that this is consistent (although it lacks compatibility with older versions of windows potentially and other Operating systems)

I have looked into it before, there is no easy way to do it as that data is supposed to be only accessible to the program that put it there. Which one is "displayed" on the volume OSD is up to windows.

The hacky way I had engineered was to internally grab the volume OSD every time it is displayed and OCR the image to get the info but that is a terrible idea.

The hacky workaround we came up with recently was either to iterate through every internal window, get their ID, get their info using an undocumented function. Then deciding on our own which is the best one to display. This would then need to be done at least twice a second (I would probably do it 10 times) so the data could be up to date. This would probably end up being too expensive to be useful but I may look into it, especially since I need to fix NowPlaying's Spotify support anyways.

A solution to monstercat's. Open the folder Documents> Rainmeter> Skins> monstercat's-visualizer> @Resources> include. Open the <MeasureSpotify.inc> file in Notepad. Under [MeasureState] Playername = Spotify, change to Playername = NowPlaying, close, and save. Refresh the cover. Returns the functionality of the control buttons.

vitaly wrote:A solution to monstercat's. Open the folder Documents> Rainmeter> Skins> monstercat's-visualizer> @Resources> include. Open the <MeasureSpotify.inc> file in Notepad. Under [MeasureState] Playername = Spotify, change to Playername = NowPlaying, close, and save. Refresh the cover. Returns the functionality of the control buttons.

Yeah if you are curious why it works to copy paste my explanation from elsewhere:

You can put any gibberish you want there as you actually stumbled upon an oddity in Rainmeter, see Rainmeter's NowPlaying plugin has a mode for an old program called Windows Live Messenger (Saying that makes me feel old) back in the day music players would forward their media status to that. So thus as a general catch all Rainmeter added support for that protocol and then sent the player commands (Which are just keyboard commands) globally (which works a lot of the time since you normally only have one media player open at a time)

See here is the thing, WLM is what Rainmeter reverts to when the player type is not recognized. Even though Spotify does not send info to WLM most people use the SpotifyPlugin for all the track info. All that most people use NowPlaying for is for the media controls. So you have only Spotify open it works fine.

tjhrulz wrote:Yeah if you are curious why it works to copy paste my explanation from elsewhere:

You can put any gibberish you want there as you actually stumbled upon an oddity in Rainmeter, see Rainmeter's NowPlaying plugin has a mode for an old program called Windows Live Messenger (Saying that makes me feel old) back in the day music players would forward their media status to that. So thus as a general catch all Rainmeter added support for that protocol and then sent the player commands (Which are just keyboard commands) globally (which works a lot of the time since you normally only have one media player open at a time)

See here is the thing, WLM is what Rainmeter reverts to when the player type is not recognized. Even though Spotify does not send info to WLM most people use the SpotifyPlugin for all the track info. All that most people use NowPlaying for is for the media controls. So you have only Spotify open it works fine.

Ahh that makes sense. So I've essentially told the plugin to use my pc's global music controls courtesy of WLM instead of Spotify's internal music controls which currently doesn't work inside of the plugin. Right?

TRMTZD wrote:Ahh that makes sense. So I've essentially told the plugin to use my pc's global music controls courtesy of WLM instead of Spotify's internal music controls which currently doesn't work inside of the plugin. Right?

Dead on.
I also have a hotfix on my desk that I will be testing in the morning that should hopefully bring Spotify back to full working order and should be be included in the next Rainmeter beta.

The update 2.1.5 seems to fix the previous, next and pause bangs.
The setposition bang does not work, at least with free users cause I have no premium (Log: Error 403: Not available for the current user).
The playpause bang pauses but instead of starting the track again it jumps to the next track.
The same goes with the play bang.

So my fix for this in the meantime - use the MediaKey measure for the commands and this plugin for the metadata, in this case there have not two MetaData-Plugins to be loaded, maybe uses a little less ressource.